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Tuesday, August 25, 2015

All you wanted to know about SAP HANA…

Historically, database
systems were designed to perform well on computer systems with limited RAM. As
a consequence, slow disk I/O was the main bottleneck in data throughput. The
architecture of those systems was designed with a focus on optimizing disk access
e.g. by minimizing the number of disk block (or pages) to be read into main
memory when processing a query. Today‘s applications execute many data intense
operations in the application layer, which leads to latency.

With the explosion of
data all over the world (15 Petabytes of new information is created every day
and expected to reach 450 billion of B2B transactions per day by 2020) &
the way Information Technology is getting used by enterprise users as well as
individuals (thanks to mobile phone revolution) , there is an acute need for
extreme performance, low latency (response time) which in turn has led the
focus on ‘In-Memory Database Platforms’.

column-oriented,
relational database management system (RDBMS) that’s designed to support

transactions and complex
query processing on the same data set. (Incidentally, HANA stands for High
Performance Analytic Appliance. Later on, SAP is not seen keen on providing
this expansion & is happy calling it just HANA, just like it did away with
the expansion of SAP long ago)

SAP HANA is a full
transactional, ACID (Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation,
Durability) compliant relational database, designed to cost-effectively
run transactions and analytics on a single copy of data, with maximum
performance.

What makes SAP HANA sizzle?

·Real Time Analytics –

Thanks to in-memory architecture
of SAP HANA, we can do OLTP (On Line Transaction Processing) & OLAP (On
Line Analytical Processing) at ease,
enabling operational analytics. SAP HANA provides on-the-fly analysis so you
can make real-time decisions. SAP HANA permits OLTP & OLAP workloads on the
same platform by storing data in high-speed memory, organizing it in columns,
partitioning and distributing it among multiple servers. This delivers faster queries
that aggregate data more efficiently yet avoids costly full-table scans and
single column indexes. There is paradigm shift for developers in HANA, since it
allows all the data intensive logic down in the database as SQL, SQL script
& HANA views, thereby ensuring the best application performance.

·Massive Speed

SAP tested the scan
speed of an SAP HANA database across a variety of Intel CPU processors. These
tests achieved results of 3.19 billion symbol scans per second per core. The early
use cases with SAP HANA address a conventional pain point by accelerating analytics,
and hence insights, on massive volumes of detailed data. Hence, end users can
not only get answers faster (e.g., CO-PA reports that used to take hours can
now run within seconds) without disruption, but also are now empowered to ask
any question without requiring additional investment of IT’s time or resources
to pre-define queries, pre-aggregate data into tables or cubes, or to generate
indexes and materialized views.

·Radical Efficiency

By porting the data
from a classic database to SAP HANA, eliminating unnecessary index and
aggregate tables, and enabling operational reporting directly within SAP HANA,
the data footprint was reduced by a factor of 37 in a test conducted and on an
average 7-8 I at customer environments. With the increase in duplicate records
increases the compression, reduced hardware cost and maintenance

·Extreme Scale

SAP, with its
partners, set a new record for the world’s largest data warehouse using the SAP
HANA platform and SAP IQ software. The data warehouse is 12.1 PB of data, which
is four times larger than the prior record. You can refer to the link shared by
SAP for all Certified
Hardware List

·Lower Cost

Providing a dual
OLTP-OLAP architecture reduces the data footprint, which saves on storage
costs. Eliminating the need for data extraction and transfer from OLTP to OLAP
saves time and resources. Forrester projected 37% cost savings over four years
when customers migrate to SAP Business Warehouse (BW) powered by SAP HANA in
year one, SAP Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) powered by SAP HANA in year
two and start using SAP HANA platform for custom application in year three.

·Big Data capabilities

SAP HANA is an ideal big data analytics platform,
capable of efficiently loading and rapidly analyzing multiple data types in
both structured and unstructured forms. With SAP Data Services, traditional
sources of structured data, such as point-of-sale, transactions, customer
records, etc., as well as non-traditional, unstructured sources, such as
website logs, social media, email, videos, etc., can be loaded into SAP HANA
for seamless modeling and analysis. One can crunch even Petabytes of data for
quick, accurate answers to sophisticated business problems.

SAP Hana Big Data Intelligence is designed to let
businesses acquire, analyze and present data from a variety of sources quickly
and affordably. It can combine SAP's Hana platform with its Event Stream
Processor as well as with SAP IQ software and the Apache Hadoop software
library when needed.

·Predictive, Spatial and Text Analysis

A powerful suite of predictive, spatial and text
analytics libraries can run across multiple data sources. This proves that HANA
is not only a In-Memory DB but a platform.

·An Open Platform

SAP HANA is an open platform that runs thousands of
third-party applications on nine industry-leading partners’ hardware. Its cloud
offerings are provided by external hosting and management partners on three
continents.

SAP HANA – The journey so far

SAP introduced HANA in
2011; it enabled SAP BW powered by HANA in 2012. In 2013, it launched SAP Business
suite powered by HANA. SAP Simple Financed powered by HANA was launched in
2014. It launched SAP S/4 HANA in 2015.

SAP S/4HANA

SAP S/4HANA is the short
form for SAP Business Suite 4 SAP HANA. It brings the next big wave of
innovation to SAP customers, similar to the transition from SAP R/2 to SAP R/3.

SAP S/4HANA is the
next-generation business suite. It is a new product fully built on the most advanced
in-memory platform today – SAP HANA – and modern design principles with the SAP
Fiori user experience (UX). SAP S/4HANA delivers massive simplifications
(customer adoption, data model, user experience, decision making, business
processes, and models) and innovations (Internet of Things, Big Data, business
networks, and mobile-first) to help businesses run simple in the digital
economy. (Click on the below image to see a bigger view)

It inherits all the
benefits of HANA mentioned earlier plus there are some additional benefits, as
explained below.

·SAP Fiori UX

It enables business users leverage a simple and
role-based user experience based on modern design principles which minimizes
training efforts while increases productivity.

SAP S/4HANA is natively designed with SAP Fiori UX offering,
an integrated user experience with modern usability and instant insight on any
device (role-based, three steps max to get the job done, mobile-first,
consistent experience across lines of business) . With SAP Fiori, you can
provide instant value to any user in any role, in any line of business. All
business users can enjoy the simplicity to get the job done across line of
businesses with a personalized, responsive, and simple user experience
available on any device. It is seen as the user experience (UX) paradigm with
unified cross-application user experience (web-based or all mobile devices). In
plain words, Fiori works as an app, executing pre-designed queries/reports with
app-like user interface.

All SAP S/4HANA innovations are intended to be
delivered with SAP Fiori UX providing the same experience on all devices.
However, a customer using SAP S/4HANA, on-premise edition is planned to still
be able to consume the traditional user interfaces.

·IOT

SAP S/4HANA is natively connected to the Internet of
Things and business networks for real-time collaboration (planned:
machine-to-machine, Ariba Network, Concur) in the networked economy

·Cloud Platform

The open platform (SAP HANA Cloud Platform) to drive
advanced applications – for example, predicting, recommending, and simulating –
while protecting existing investments. SAP S/4HANA is natively born for easy
adoption (guided configuration, and easy onboarding, from the discovery of the
solution through cloud trials to deployment with preconfigured best practices
and templates)

·Choice of deployment

SAP S/4HANA is natively engineered for providing
choice of deployment (on premise, cloud and hybrid) to customers to drive quick
time-to-value. SAP S/4HANA also gives customers the option to fully leverage
the new HANA multi-tenancy functionality as provided by the SAP HANA platform
(currently support package 9) for the cloud. Cloud-based deployments are ideal
for smaller-scale deployments, start-ups and independent software vendors
(ISVs), and for situations where a pay-as-you-go model is preferred over larger
capital expenditure. (Going for Opex
instead of Capex)

·Reduced data foot print

Organizations can now reduce their data footprint and
work with larger data sets in one system (for example, ERP, CRM, SRM, SCM, PLM
co-deployed) to save hardware costs, operational costs, and time. SAP S/4 HANA
enables drastic compression in database size. In one of the tests conducted by
SAP, Production Database (any database other than HANA & running ERP) size
of 7.1 TB got crunched to 0.5 TB with SAP S/4 HANA

Moving to SAP S/4HANA
for a typical existing SAP ERP 6.0 customer will require a move to the latest
enhancement package, followed by a database migration from any DB to SAP HANA
combined with the deployment of the exchange innovation (new code). From an
execution perspective, these steps can be executed in sequence or as a combined
step. Moving to SAP S/4HANA for an existing SAP Business Suite powered by SAP
HANA customer is even faster as only the deployment of the exchange innovation
(new code) is required.

The roadmap of SAP S/4
HANA is evolving pretty fast.

SAP Simple Finance
(which provides personalized information for end users with granular drill
down, simpler, faster and does away with total/indexes/aggregation) as a part
of S/4 HANA suite, is already making waves.

SAP Simple Logistics
launch is scheduled in the near term.

SuccessFactors is
the default HR solution for S/4 HANA to run HR processes. Migration from SAP
HCM to Successfactors is available.
(Integration of SA HCM with S/4 HANA is possible running as separated
instance)

As per the Forrester
assessment of 11 vendors (Aerospike, DataStax, IBM, Kognitio, MemSQL,
Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, Starcounter, Teradata, and VoltDB) with offering of
In-Memory Database, SAP emerged as a clear Leader (with Oracle at a distant second position) as
per in Forrester Wave Q3’15 report.

Conclusion

SAP HANA might be
overkill for customers that are transactional-only or that do not take
advantage of the platform’s ability to support analytics, calculation, or
algorithm processing within its application logic, since SAP HANA is expensive
in comparison with other in-memory solutions.

But now you have the
speed at a reduced Hardware cost and unlimited data to play with. This
certainly sounds like music to the ears of customers (especially in Life
Sciences or FMCG verticals) where SAP is used on 24*7 basis for
mission-critical processes across the globe or for the customers in
data-crunching BFSI industry. Some of
them have already embraced SAP HANA & others will certainly join the
bandwagon soon!

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About Me

Hi there! I’m Prashant Pimpalekar. Having spent over two decades in the IT industry in top-notch companies in senior leadership roles, thought to share some of my learnings, some tips, some insights from the areas of my professional interest (which range from SAP to Cloud to Apps to Analytics to Management). In short,trying to be an IT evangelist, something which is close to my heart! So, there will be something in this Blog for the novice and for the expert; for geeks as well as for the management-types! :-)
• I was a speaker at JSUG (Japan SAP Users group) conferences in Tokyo (May 2012) & Osaka (June 2012).
•Written technical as well as management articles/blogs:
-ERP: The Viable Solution – Times of India – Oct’1996
- The Next Wave of SAP Implementations – Maharashtra Herald – March’06
- BPM (Business Process Management): The New Mantra – Maharashtra Herald – Nov’05
-BPO to KPO: The Road Ahead – Maharashtra Herald – Sept’05
-SAP white papers (Intra-company)
-Can India ever be a Developed country? (rediff.com) – Aug’04